Trailer Mash

Our mashup this week (see video above) takes an account of an emotionally tormented woman who can only find peace in the arms of an unlikely lover and mixes it up with an account of an emotionally tormented woman who can only find peace in the arms of an unlikely lover, or as we say here, My Week With a Dangerous Method.

And following this, since you are out holiday shopping and have no time at all, a prompt wrap-up of the weekend teasers that have been searing your eyeballs at every cineplex, in every ad break, and following each search-engine mistype these past few days…

Arthur Christmas. A bunch of familiar Brit character actors drawn on their seemingly endless reserves of voice artistry to lend yet another rip-roaring 3dCGIholidaytoon some by the numbers clarse. The movie is supposedly great, say all the friends of writer Peter Baynham, a powerful and reliable piston in the U.K. comedy engine, but the trailer looks as though it's trying to take your eye out all the bloody time.

Hugo. Martin Scorsese also does 3-D: Endless tracking shots, dark palette, familiar faces not doing their best work. In 3-D.

Rampart. Probably the film Martin Scorsese should be making. Woody Harrelson back on ripped psycho mode but this time wearing an LA police badge. Did you know that not all members of the LAPD are saints? Has anyone addressed that on film before? Looks very crowd-pleaserish.

House of Pleasures. Belle époque France, a brothel, classical music, subtitles: A metaphor for the contemporary wholesale prostitution of our identities online, or exactly what it sounds like?

We Bought a Zoo. The main lesson of this trailer is that Matt Damon is too old for Scarlett Johansson. Also he buys a zoo and saves a bunch of animals, but probably not all of them.

Khodorkovsky. Documentary of the week is a biopic of jailed former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorovsky. From this teaser we learn he personally made five billion dollars in a single deal with Boris Yeltsin, that Putin bears a grudge, and that some dramatic scenes have been recreated using a technique not dissimilar to animated woodblock prints.

My Week with Marilyn. The reason why Michelle Williams is head and shoulders the best actress of her generation is that no matter how much she gives on screen she is always holding something in reserve. And that thing is agony. Which is why she is note perfect as Marilyn Monroe in this otherwise slightly soapy trailer. With every girly Marilyn smile and flirtatious apercu you can see her grim future, her grief and her oceans of existential pain written like a suicide note across her eyes.

A Dangerous Method. Aka A Dangerous Casting. While Michelle Williams seems to carry the immense burden of pain necessary to imitate Marilyn Monroe, as a turn of the Century Vienna psychiatric patient Keira Knightley has the look of someone for whom hysteria is what happens when you can't help rolling on the floor screaming with laugher. This is understandable since she is being treated for her condition not by Dr Carl Jung but by Magneto. Coming out of it rather better than these two hams is Viggo Mortensen who seems to have bloated to the size of a normal human being to play Freud, at least according to this trailer.